2009
$6
16 fully illustrated pages
I found an old tobacco "Movie Star" card in a Brooklyn Flea Market with Snub Pollard on it. What a face! What a mustache! I started carrying it around in my wallet, behind my ID.
I didn't know anything about Snub at the time and he became a bit of an obsession; where did he come from? Did he curse a lot? Did he hop trains or toss pennies to the beggars? Did he ever walk down 42nd St? This preoccupation turned into an art project when I started putting words in his mouth. In a couple weeks I'd written Snub Pollard's Autobiography, which is essentially a picture book.
The book explores the psyche of a man from the inside out and in the loosest possible terms -- mostly images and non-sequitors. The result is what I consider a quilt of frozen moments, some life-defining and others completely unremarkable, woven together in an effort to resurrect the memory of one of hollywood's most successful silent comics. Someone who, to me, epitomizes the idea that a famous life disappears from memory twenty or thirty seconds later than an obscure one.
Inevitably I did pick up some concrete information about Snub in the course of the project and I incorporated those things into the work. If you've ever seen Singing In The Rain, when the title song ends, Gene Kelly hands his umbrella to an aged Snub Pollard - Snub didn't have a single line and was uncredited in the film but his strut is unmistakable.
